My hard drive has started to fail

My 4 year old hard drive is starting to fail. The SMART status is reporting difficulty reading some sectors.

Fortunately I caught it early using a tool called HDDScan, which reads the SMART status and does surface scans. The drive was under warranty (5 years on an older Seagate drive) so it was replaced. All the data was moved off before any information was lost. If it was lost I have an onside and an offsite backup, as well as online backups of some things.

Everyone should check their hard drives with a SMART tool occasionally!

Defraggler offers Smart drive status report.

Onyx - Great Mac utility.

I use Smart Reporter on my Macs: http://www.corecode.at​/smartreporter/

In my experience Win 7 and 8 seem to have some SMART monitoring built in, and will alert you to certain types of hard drive issues. Having a program that can fully ready the SMART status is still useful though, I have Defraggler on all my systems.

Win7 didn't alert me to this problem.

I didn't know defraggler did SMART monitoring? It only seems to say "good" or nothing - it says nothing for my WD drive, but reports good for my Seagate drives.

tim wrote in post #15878012
I didn't know defraggler did SMART monitoring? It only seems to say "good" or nothing - it says nothing for my WD drive, but reports good for my Seagate drives.

Click health tab after running analyze for the full info.

tim wrote in post #15878012
Win7 didn't alert me to this problem.

I didn't know defraggler did SMART monitoring? It only seems to say "good" or nothing - it says nothing for my WD drive, but reports good for my Seagate drives.

Yeah, Windows won't tell you about everything. Would be nice if it did, but isoMorphic is right about Defraggler, it will spit out every bit of SMART data available to it from the drive if you go to the Health tab.

Thanks guys! i am gonna test Defraggler at work and test out HDDScan at home.

Somehow I am not getting HDDScan 3.3 (not the malware, made sure of that) to work at all for me. Opening the application does nothing but open a process that I eventually end after 5-10 minutes of nothing.

isoMorphic wrote in post #15878121
Click health tab after running analyze for the full info.

It gives you full info, but no interpretation. That's the problem with smart, too much data, too little information.

vsg28 wrote in post #15880898
Somehow I am not getting HDDScan 3.3 (not the malware, made sure of that) to work at all for me. Opening the application does nothing but open a process that I eventually end after 5-10 minutes of nothing.

The blue window doesn't appear? Checked all your monitors?

I tried it on my laptop first without anything attached.